This is a blog about interacting systems and how they behave: systems thinking construed broadly. Financial markets and economics; politics; and occasionally physical systems are discussed, with an attempt at focusing on how the rules of the game determine the strategies of participants and the possible outcomes.

Monday, 22 September 2008

New York really wants London to succeed

According to Bloomberg:

New York State will begin to regulate part of the $62 trillion market for credit-default swaps, Governor David Paterson said.

The state will treat contracts in which the buyer also owns the underlying security as insurance, Paterson said today in a news release.

That's it then. London always was ahead of New York in structured credit: now, provided we do not do something similarly stupid, we can own this market.

It is worth pointing out, en passant, how successful treating credit derivatives as just another insurance contract has been so far. The largest two firms to adopt that paradigm were MBIA and Ambac. Unless you count AIG of course. Still, New York will still have better looking trucks. That's something.Update. The Economist has a nice article, Guilt by suspicion, about the benefits of derivatives and the mud slung at them. I do think it is worth remembering that the cause of all of this mess was not derivatives, it was mortgages.